How do you shop for food in Paris? Mostly you walk the streets. Yes, there are the large supermarkets (grandes surfaces), like Carrefour, but they are limited to the outlying areas, where real estate prices and zonings make it possible to put together large venues. The problem, since the inception of the city, is how to distribute the day to day necessities to the consumer level.
There are smaller supermarket chains, like FranPrix and Monoprix (both flaunt the word prix in their name, to implant the idea that price is what they are all about) spread all through the city. And then there are the infinite variety of grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stores, bakeries (boulangeries) crowding each other on the most frequented sidewalks. Next to them you will find the different kinds of “traiteurs”, doing what we would call the take-out business.
Rue St. Antoine, 4th Arrondissement, Paris
For instance in my neighborhood, two blocks away on rue Saint Antoine, I turn left and I find a “charcutier” offering a dizzying array of meat-loaves (patés), baked in ovenware (terrines) or in crust (en croûte), with mushrooms (forestière), with different kinds of meats, mixed or side by side, plus pre-cooked entrées like sweetbreads with mushrooms in cream sauce, or salmon layered on crêpes with mayonnaise and blanched shredded vegetables, whole salmon baked and jellied, salads like celery root in mayonnaise, pasta salad, shredded carrot salad. My favorite lunch is hure parisienne, pressed pork tongues with pistachios and sherry jelly. The business of the charcutier goes back to the Middle Ages, when at the time of the slaughtering of animals, around St. Martin’s day, November 11th, in preparation for the winter months and the coming festivities at the end of the 40 day Martinmas fast (which in the Christian tradition is called Advent), the meats had to be prepared to last. The most common way of preserving meats is salting, making salt a prime trading commodity in the Ancient world. The via Salaria, bringing salt from the sea to Rome and to other points inland, runs right through the Roman Forum.
The charcutier would devise different ways of precooking, seasoning and preparing meats and poultry. The patés, by pressing the ingredients together and so excluding oxygen as much as possible, and then sterilizing by cooking in a closed container, plus a covering with a baked crust or a jelly, were meant to provide duration to perishable ingredients before mechanical cooling was possible. The coming winter in northerly latitudes helped to ensure the integrity of the larder.
In southerly climates the techniques were salting, spicing, curing and drying, leading to the unending array of andouilles, chorizos, capicolas, salumes, and merghez found around the Mediterranean.
Continuing along rue St. Antoine after my charcutier I find a cheese shop (fromager), where in this fall season, apart from the three hundred-odd cheese varieties common in France, on a huge paella flat pan, heated on a butane burner, a raclette is cooking, sliced potatoes cooked in bacon fat, covered in cheese slices. Walking on I can get a bottle of wine from either of the three small merchants within three hundred yards, a baguette from three different boulangers, some foie-gras (two merchants), fruit and vegetables from a fruiterer, who right now is offering cranberries and pomegranates from Southern France, cherimoyas (custard apple) and kaki’s from Spain and Tunisia, red and white Muscat grapes from Italy (I have reacquired the taste for grapes with seeds, so much more flavorful than the uniform seedless varieties obtainable in US supermarkets), artichokes, celery beets and fennel from around Paris, Italian and Spanish tomatoes, and seven varieties of wild and cultured mushrooms.
Further on two chocolatiers offer dozens of chocolate confections for every taste. Next door you can buy twenty varieties of honey. In between, a refrigerated counter displays Asiatic take-out, presented as any French traiteur. A bit further another shop specializes in sushi, and moving on chicken is roasting on a an eight spit roaster, with potatoes at the bottom to soak up all the good fat and juices. If you order you will have to decide on free-range (fermier) or battery bred. The happiness of chicken will cost you money.
In between all this abundance there is a straightforward meat merchant (boucher), offering the traditional cuts of meat, plus pre-cut trimmed and rolled pieces for your oven at home. Across the street a new fish-monger has just set up a gleaming shop, with twenty kinds of whole fish, and all the fillets thereof, plus fish and shellfish salads, and some four tables to eat right there. At this time of year oysters are on display everywhere, of French origin, Arcachon, Cancale and Marennes plus a number of smaller breeders (cultivateurs) with their own distribution networks.
Another block away, across the street is LeNotre, legendary patissier, exhibiting its confections in Art-Deco-ish frugality.
Boulevard Richard Lenoir. The Bastille column in background.
Once I have finished scoping my street, if it is Thursday before one pm I will walk five blocks further to the Boulevard Richard Lenoir to a neighborhood street market. It also sets up on Sundays. This market is medium sized, and combines with discount clothing. There are fish-mongers, fruiterers, cheese merchants, bakers, Italian specialties, Middle eastern dried fruit and pastries, fried dough in different forms, charcutiers, bouchers. Some are cooking paella, or boeuf bourguignon, wafting irresistible aromas towards you .
The fruit stands are predominantly peopled with North-African Maghreb (Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan) vendors who will tout their wares loudly and exchange loud taunts rich in the gutturals of their berber Arabic dialects. You will be enveloped in cries of “Goutez Monsieur” (taste it, Sir) while dodging proffered slices of melon, orange, peaches, and “Avec ceci?” (and with this?) encouraging you to purchase something else.
Marché des Enfants Rouges
Should I not be well provided for, I can walk a little further into the third arrondissement (ten blocks), to the covered and permanent Marché des Enfants Rouges accessible from the rue de Bretagne, reputedly the oldest in Paris, dating back to the 17th century. I read that it used to be an orphanage, and the children wore red tunics, hence the name. Being in the fashionable North Marais this little market is certainly more expensive than Richard Lenoir. Some of the merchants will serve a dozen tables within the market with their Moroccan, Latin American and Antillais meals.
Or, on the other side of the Bastille, following the Faubourg Saint Antoine for about a mile, I could reach the covered Beauvau and place de l’Aligré open markets, available daily.
At the latest count I identified 81 street markets, covered and open-air, active in the twenty arrondissements of Paris. They are supervised by the City of Paris, which provides the electrical outlets for the refrigeration equipment that the merchants need to bring to their sites, as well as the basic tube framing for the individual booths. The merchants pay a fee to the City, plus a sales tax, and the Value Added Tax that goes to the European Community, and the City will also take care of the clean-up after the periodic markets close.
Most of the food that comes into Paris passes through the huge Rungis market, the largest wholesale market in the world, near Orly Airport, on the crossroad of three main motorways, and with dedicated railroad access. It covers 573 acres, handles 1.5 million tons of fresh products per year, and employs 12,000 people. Owned by the French State, Rungis market rents facilities to 1300 wholesalers and importers and serves 18 million consumers. Food quality controls are done on site, by private enterprises to regulations from the French government and the European Community, monitored at local and regional level by Government experts.
The good thing is that sampling all those markets requires much walking around, which consumes calories. Enough, I hope.
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